Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 434
January 25, 2014
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
Apparently two days in a row I wrote on Disquiet about artists from Virginia. Maybe tomorrow I'll make it a trifecta. ->
Helix has had an impact. Soft r&b tunes from the 1970s playing in public places now freak me out a little. ->
Yahoo! The @djunto weekly music project series is now well over 3,000 extant tracks and 420 contributors: http://t.co/Cjn2aOvZib ->
Man, it's hard these days to type "Yahoo!" and have people not think you're writing about, you know, Yahoo! ->
Thought my Nexus 7's screen paled next to my iPad (retina) but it was just that the iPad's wallpaper was more bright/colorful. #stupidme ->
#aeolian #metrics. The week's @djunto was inspired by "White Blur 1" off subject of my new book, Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol II. ->
Just did my first interview with a podcast for my 33 1/3 Aphex Twin book. That was fun. Good questions. More on it as its broadcast date ne… ->
Man, that @Synthtopia sure has a sizable readership. Enormous spike for something I wrote last week. Thanks! ->
Correlation between percentage of apps downloaded but never used and percentage of hoodies the hoods of which have never been worn. ->
"Musical notation presented unusual challenges to the new craft of printing in the 15th century." Free UCPress book: http://t.co/gl1bC2HXf9 ->
25 days until my Aphex Twin 33 1/3 book (SAW2) is officially released. The album has 25 tracks (well, one edition does). Time for countdown. ->
Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Vol II reverse-order daily track countdown: #25 ("Matchsticks") http://t.co/bM55wjZeTB ->
Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Vol II reverse-order daily track countdown: #24 ("White Blur 2") http://t.co/BZSa963Pu2 ->
This week's @djunto project: @freebassel. It goes live this Thursday. #creativecommons #openweb #freebassel ->
Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco: http://t.co/FrVmKgO1Mx ->
The Outdoor Public Warning System siren at the corner of 21st Ave and Geary in San Francisco: http://t.co/wvsX98xwQx #urbanstudies #sound ->
Thumbs up to Beats Music for factoring in music you "hate" when sorting out your preferences. ->
Weird, @beatsmusic lists Aphex Twin SAW2 as 35 tracks and yet only lists 20 of them. Actual number: between 23 and 25, depending on version. ->
This is great: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have teamed up for a third time (for Gone Girl) with David Fincher: http://t.co/axQ1BXuYWs ->
I messed that last tweet up. It's @mariplasma (aka Marielle Jakobsons) not @darwinsbitch who'll perform with @subnaughtsounds + @jared_smyth in reply to subnaughtsounds ->
Excited to report: @mariplasma @jared_smyth @subnaughtsounds to perform Aphex Twin–inspired music at my March 20 @citylightsbooks reading ->
The app Yellofier (by Boris Blank of Yello) has been ported to Android from iOS: http://t.co/oxC9KRP5G9 ->
The URL "TiananmenSunrise dot com" is available. Just saying. ->
German word for "Disappointed the Tiananmen sunrise image was misreported because felt like Code 46 is real, yet happy Code 46 isn't real." ->
New semester of my sound-in-the-media-landscape course at the Academy of Art begins a week from today. Very excited. ->
Talk of Twitter being "ephemeral" complicated for me because what I tweet is auto-compiled weekly on my website. It's like a public journal. ->
Are we at Peak Faraday Cage? There's one in Person of Interest, and in Intelligence. Any others out there in TV land? ->
First thing I did in MacPaint in 1984 was to recreate the inside cover of Starless and Bible Black. Happy 30th birthday, Mac. ->
Proof of life. MT @BrewCrewJess: @disquiet's book on Aphex Twin's 'Selected Ambient Works Volume II' just arrived! http://t.co/8VB0C43UtZ ->
Mention today on the Creative Commons official blog about next @dunto project: http://t.co/cPvrQUigYG #freebassel ->
Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Vol II reverse-order daily track countdown: #23 (“Tassels”) http://t.co/NfY4CqYRyg (w/ proof-of-book-life) ->
Loving the grid version of the Aphex Twin album cover that @boondesign did for my daily, 25-track SAW2 countdown: http://t.co/KbKUw12RuH ->
Thanks to @hecanjog for tweeting a photo of where in my 33 1/3 book I thank the @djunto: http://t.co/sibZ4wQdyA. Plus a cat. in reply to hecanjog ->
RIP: Douglas Davis, Critic and Internet Artist, Dies at 80: http://t.co/Y2IyqTpt0C ->
Talking about glitch, "in between" parts of songs, and learning from Fennesz: Prefuse 73 interview I did last week: http://t.co/0FmFEGwN0Q. ->
This is a picture I've looked forward to taking for a long time: http://t.co/WbV6wJyn9I ->
My 3-year-old likes my Aphex Twin book's cover but wonders why there are no pictures. I explained the LP has pictures, so we looked at that. ->
I don't know if @VibeMagazine and @EW are paying for these spam ad PR emails pushing their news links, but they're ridiculous. ->
RIP, Italian film music composer Riz Ortolani (87): http://t.co/kBFvuySOOZ via @geetadayal #mondocane ->
For this week's @djunto project, we make an ancient soundscape + raise awareness of an imprisoned coder: http://t.co/13jdupeNd9 #freebassel ->
On a street corner equal distance from a pho place and a pozole place. Weighed the options. Went with pozole. ->
Looks like that free stream of Arcade Fire's score to Her is offline. Maybe it wasn't official? ->
Supa cool. Apparently the Kindle edition of my 33 1/3 book on Aphex Twin's SAW2 is available for preorder http://t.co/lUoldz5rlc. #justsayin ->
A flurry of spambot followers late Friday afternoon is Twitter's equivalent of happy hour. ->
This library makes my boyhood science fiction dreams come true. The HVAC drone is so starship. ->
Four tracks so far in our #freebassel @djunto project to create soundscapes for the ancient city of Palmyra: https://t.co/nCC6KscR3t ->
Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Vol II reverse-order daily track countdown: #21 (“Lichen”) http://t.co/Ymah1u3qzJ ->
Today's Aphex Twin SAW2 countdown ("Lichen," #21) includes five versions: original, live, remixed, slowed, reversed: http://t.co/Ymah1u3qzJ ->
January 24, 2014
Is It Solo Piano When There Is Noise?
The framing material is alternately sheer and grating, a haze of static, a thick brush through which the piano, slow and steady, occasionally makes itself heard — first some tentative notes, then a hint of a melody, then a sour note to emphasize that all is still not well. The development is not restricted to that solo piano. First of all, it’s odd to think of it as solo piano, since there is so much more going on in the track, but everything else is a noise so primal it seems to come from some other plane. Yet that noise also changes as time passes, the volume and the brittle metallic intensity rising and falling in waves. This is “Week Twenty Nine Project” of Madeleine Cocolas’ ongoing attempt to write an original piece of music each week, last mentioned here in June 2013.
This is the note she wrote when she posted it:
Oh my goodness. Have you seen Gravity yet? If not you should go and see it now. Preferably in 3D. It was so tense that I had worn hot pink lipstick to go see it (nothing special there – I wear hot pink lipstick everywhere), but when I went to the bathroom afterwards I noticed I had smudged it all over my face from holding my hands against my face. And that stuff doesn’t really come off very easily.
Anyhow, here’s my Week Twenty-Nine Project. I had fun with this one and spent hours manipulating some of Greg’s guitar noodling by slowing it down, reversing it, putting reverb and other effects on it, then I put a simple piano melody over the top. I like the relentless wall of noise that sits behind the piano melody. Maybe I’m still harboring a bit of the tension from Gravity?!
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/madeleine-cocolas. She’s an Australian composer based in Seattle, Washington. More from her at madeleinecocolas.blogspot.com.
Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 21 (“Lichen”)
I am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a month after my book’s publication. More on my Aphex Twin book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com. The plan is to do this countdown in the reverse order, from last track to first. For reference, an early draft of the introduction is online, as is the book’s seven-chapter table of contents. The book’s publisher posted an interview with me when I was midway through the writing process.
There is some irony to doing this countdown since the book is already shipping to folks who pre-ordered it via an online retailer such as Amazon, but the official date stands, and that’s the target — the end date — of this countdown, February 13. And for what it’s worth, while the physical copies are mailing now from retailers, the Kindle version won’t turn on until February 13. Still, the digital version costs less.
“Lichen” has one of the most beautiful proper melodies on the record. It is characteristic of Aphex Twin at his sweetest — as in the oft-licensed “Avril 14″ and this record’s “Blue Calx.” In my book, the person who signed Aphex Twin to Sire Records in the United States jokes about how she’d warn British musicians off signing with Sire in the U.K., as they’d just end up on a label with Enya. It is not to Aphex Twin’s discredit that this track might sound alright in a playlist alongside Enya. The lilting melody bears some similarity to a theme from James Horner’s music for James Cameron’s Titanic, which came out three years later, in 1997.
Speaking of 1997, here’s a version reportedly recorded live at the Glastonbury festival in 1997:
This is a remix by Wisp, who later signed to a small label co-run by Aphex, called Rephlex. There’s a bit more about him in the book:
Here’s a version slowed down significantly — the track is 17 minutes long, compared to its original length of around four minutes. It’s remarkable how the melody is still apparent:
And here it is reversed:
More on my Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com.
Thanks to boondesign.com for the sequential grid treatment of the album cover.
January 23, 2014
Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 22 (“Spots”)
I am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a month after my book’s publication. More on my Aphex Twin book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com. The plan is to do this countdown in the reverse order, from last track to first. For reference, an early draft of the introduction is online, as is the book’s seven-chapter table of contents. The book’s publisher posted an interview with me when I was midway through the writing process.
There is some irony to doing this countdown since the book is already shipping to folks who pre-ordered it via an online retailer such as Amazon, but the official date stands, and that’s the target — the end date — of this countdown, February 13.
It sure is exciting to see it pop up in feeds by people whom you’ve never met:
“Spots” on Selected Ambient Works Volume II weighs in at about 55bpm and just under 12 minutes in length, at 11:27 according to my file’s data as it plays in VLC. But what is the BPM of a song, especially an ambient song, an ambient piece of music? The beat is less like a drum and more like a drum machine designed by the people who make Nerf footballs. The beat becomes the melody as time goes on. In other words, when the beat is this simple, and left alone, the minor variations take on melodic importance.
There’s a vocal, too, what seems at first to be a girl’s giggle refracted down a digital hall of mirrors until it pixelates and merges with the beat, until the giggle becomes vaporous and its rhythm and that of the beat become one. Later the voice gets oafish, takes a deeper tone, less Girl Scout blushing at the cookie table, more Dungeons and Dragons aficionado who’s spilled chocolate milk on his character binder. The girl’s isn’t the only talking, either. There’s something spoken, broken up digitally, like if C3P0 had been the subject of surveillance in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.
And one more thing, and a not unimportant one: The song ends. About 30 seconds before it ends, much of the interior content drops out and then, quite suddenly, the momentum slows, like someone’s pulled the plug on a metronome and it’s left to sway as its remaining energy slowly flags.
Here it is reversed:
More on my Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com.
Thanks to boondesign.com for the sequential grid treatment of the album cover.
Disquiet Junto Project 0108: Free Bassel
Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate.
This project was published in the evening, California time, on Thursday, January 23, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 27, 2014, as the deadline.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0108: Free Bassel
For this week’s project, we’re going to create soundscapes for an ancient Middle Eastern city. And in the process, we’re going to raise awareness about an imprisoned open-source developer with strong ties to the Creative Commons community. Bassel Khartabil, before his arrest on March 15, 2012, in Damascus, was working on several projects, among them a 3D rendering of the ancient city of Palmyra. Much as Bassel was trying to revive an ancient world, you are, in essence, keeping one of his projects alive while he is incapable of doing so.
The project instructions are as follows:
Step 1: View this video for background on Bassel’s digital Palmyra project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G7fy...
Step 2: If you aren’t viewing this instruction on the Disquiet.com project page, go to the following URL to view three still images from Bassel’s 3D work:
http://disquiet.com/2014/01/23/disqui...
Step 3: Create a soundscape of between one and three minutes that might be employed in an immersive, completed digital visualization of ancient Palmyra.
Deadline: Monday, January 27, 2014, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be between 1 and 3 minutes in length.
Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0108-freebassel” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).
Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:
More on this 108th Disquiet Junto project (“Create a soundscape for the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra.”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2014/01/23/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
More on the campaign to free Bassel at
For their collaboration on this project, special thanks to: Niki Korth, Barry Threw, and Jon Phillips.
Proof of (Book) Life
This is a picture I’ve been looking forward to taking for a long time:
January 22, 2014
Post-Classical Sequel
The second album from Christina Vantzou is due out on February 24. Titled No. 2, it follows her earlier No. 1, which was released in late 2011. The new album is on the label Kranky, which is home to such notable musicians as Jessica Baliff, Greg Davis, Grouper, and Keith Fullerton Whitman, as well as the Dead Texan, which is Vantzou’s collaboration with Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid, also on the Kranky roster. Kranky has posted a track from No. 2 in advance of the album’s release. “Going Backwards to Recover That Which Was Left Behind” is a slow-moving chamber piece that builds as it goes, its increasing density of instrumentation at each moment in an eager, quiet struggle to keep the increasing momentum from undoing the stability of what the piece has accomplished thus far. Melodic fragments are repeated on varied instruments, the orchestration swelling as it passes its midpoint, and a reticent horn section — reminiscent of David Byrne’s Knee Plays — eventually filling things out. Absolutely beautiful.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/kranky. More by Christina Vantzou at christinavantzou.com, which is where the above images are from.
Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 23 (“Tassels”)
I am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a month after my book’s publication. More on my Aphex Twin book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com. The plan is to do this countdown in the reverse order, from last track to first. For reference, an early draft of the introduction is online, as is the book’s seven-chapter table of contents. The book’s publisher posted an interview with me when I was midway through the writing process.
Can't wait to read @disquiet's book on Aphex Twin's 'Selected Ambient Works Volume II' (33 1/3) that just arrived! pic.twitter.com/UJvEUtiT8A
— Jess Lemont (@BrewCrewJess) January 22, 2014
There is some irony to doing this countdown since the book is already shipping to folks who pre-ordered it via an online retailer such as Amazon, but the official date stands, and that’s the target — the end date — of this countdown, February 13.
This piece is about as far from the concept of a “song” as the album gets. “Tassels” is a noise whorl, a burred whorl, a flangy spray, a sequence of undulating static. It is a thick mass of white noise that gets the appellation of “song” — gets categorized as “song” — for the simple reason that it is one track among two dozen or so on a record of things that are occasionally taken as songs, that broader understanding itself more a matter of context and format than of form. “Tassels” is a song by association. Beyond that association, it is anything but a song.
There are, in essence, two portions to the material that make up “Tassels”: There is the noise and there is the tone. The noise is like that of a passing jet plane, its fuselage drone a slow-motion experiment in doppler fantasia. The tone is a sinewy curve of synthesized anxiety; if it suggests an airborne vehicle, it would be more spacecraft than plane, and considerably less likely of Earth origin. The track is the less the score than the sound design to a sequence of an unscreened Alien sequel. There’s a long hallway, and a lot of dead crew mates, and things are almost certainly going to get worse. Perhaps this is why “Tassels” appears toward the end of the album. It’s a premonition of exiting the chill-out room.
Here it is, reversed:
More on my Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com.
Thanks to boondesign.com for the sequential grid treatment of the album cover.
January 21, 2014
The Drone, Writ Long
The latest Elizabeth Velvdon track is quite distinct from other recent work of hers. Where her “The Pure Water, Filled with Light”" was a solo piano work marked by brief moments of melodic fragments and sudden stoppages, her “The Frost Is Setting In” is a deep, “longform” drone that tests the listener’s patience at the same time as lulling the listener. Like those two opposed responses, the track comes in alternating waves, short ones that arrive in brief, dependable cycles, like a boat adrift on a mechanical current. The word “longform” is one that she herself has applied to the track as a tag, along with “minimalism” and “cold drone” and, for good measure, simply “drone.” The word “longform” is used most often in description of online writing, of pieces whose length allow for a depth of exploration and insight, research and perspectives. Here, there is certainly an immersive intent, but the piece, quite the contrary, is still and singular, despite its extended length.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/elizabethveldon. More from Veldon, who is based in Glasgow, Scotland, at elizabethveldon.tumblr.com, twitter.com/elizabethveldon, and elizabethveldon.bandcamp.com.
Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 24 (“White Blur 2″)
I am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a month after my book’s publication. More on my Aphex Twin book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com. The plan is to do this countdown in the reverse order, from last track to first. For reference, an early draft of the introduction is online, as is the book’s seven-chapter table of contents. The book’s publisher posted an interview with me when I was midway through the writing process.
If Selected Ambient Works Volume II is to be thought of as chillout music, as sanctum music, as comforting-from-the-storm music, then the final tracks of it prepare you to head back into the world, in particular this piece (heard above), which is track 24, 23, or 22, depending on your edition. It is commonly referred to as “White Blur 2” (with another track, often re-titled “White Blur” or “White Blur 1,” being the one that is built on a wind chime).
In my book I interview Greg Eden, the individual who was responsible for the “fan naming” of the officially untitled tracks on the album. At the time of the record’s release, back in 1994, Eden was a British university student of physics. Later he worked for Warp for a decade, and these days he is a manager of such electronic musicians at Mark Pritchard and Chris Clark. He says, in part, of the process of looking at the art on the inside cover of the album and divining track titles: “That’s a white blur, but there’s another white blur, so that’s ‘White Blur 2.’ I didn’t consult a mystic or go on a DMT journey. It was just very ‘describe what you see.’”
There’s a rudimentary melody played as if on futuristic talking drum, a tuned drum where each beat is succinct in being, essentially, little more than a soft attack, a cotton mallet. At times a second voicing of that melody occurs, heard above the original, but it, too, while tuned higher, is a beat in the form of a melody, or perhaps vice versa, or more to the point standing in the space between those two presumed poles. There’s a gurgle and an insistent, geiger counter beat at the very start of “White Blur 2,” and that gurgle, a contorted roar at points, slowly takes on the appearance of a voice, eventually becoming a stoned cackle. (Detractors — there are those who persist in the idea that the album is a prank — might suggest this is Aphex Twin laughing at his audience.) The final moments are the track’s most beautiful, as each phrase of the core melody is tweaked slightly, nudged and bent as if it’s been pulled like a piece of Silly Putty.
Here is the track reversed (pretty much all the tracks are available backwards). The melody is symmetrical enough to be almost indistinguishable, but the voices are warped, and the attack on notes during certain segments is long enough to sound significantly backwards here:
More on my Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com.
